Over the last few years, the popularity and the development of social networks has strongly increased. Indeed, an important number of social networks exist in parallel. Consequently, there has been a rising number of enterprises wanting to further leverage the benefits of this trend.
However, the possibilities to bind several networks are limited.
For example, a user A from Facebook™ cannot write an email to a user B from LinkedIn™ as neither is visible on the other network.
Solutions such as social network aggregators have been implemented in order to aggregate several social networks and to provide them to end users.
Nevertheless, these solutions do not fully comply with enterprises wishing to utilise and explore the potential of social networks, thus causing the following shortcomings.
Although the aggregators enable to update information to multiple social networks, contacts of different social networks cannot be interconnected.
In addition, enterprises are currently sceptical about using social networks as all information is publicly available. Furthermore, if enterprises expose a social account to customers, all the information associated with this social account are available as no levels of private grouping are currently possible in the popular social networks.
Furthermore, enterprises that need to create their own social network for privacy reasons cannot do so at the moment, because there is no conception of creation of private social networks.